The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Wireless mobile devices (e.g., user equipment, or “UE”) may communicate with each other over a wireless wide area network (“WWAN”), e.g., using radio access technologies (“RAT”) such as the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (“LTE”) Advanced Release 10 (March 2011) (the “LTE-A Standard”), the IEEE 802.16 standard, IEEE Std. 802.16-2009, published May 29, 2009 (“WiMAX”), as well as any other wireless protocols that are designated as 3G, 4G, 5G, and beyond.
Some UEs also may be configured to communicate directly with other UEs, e.g., using device-to-device (“D2D”) communication. D2D communication may be used, e.g., when UEs initiate communication with each other while within direct wireless range of each other. RATs that may be used in this manner may include 802.11 (“WiFi”), BlueTooth, near field communication (“NFC”), FlashLinq by Qualcomm®, and so forth.
UEs may initiate communication with each other over a WWAN, but may be in, or move into, sufficient proximity to exchange data directly, e.g., using WiFi Direct, BlueTooth, Flashlinq, NFC, etc. Continuing to using WWAN resources to communicate in such a situation may drain WWAN resources that may be put to better use for communications between UEs that are remote from each other.